A friend of mine has a house in Camden Town. It’s down what was a quiet side street just a couple of minutes walk from the hustle and the crowds - what estate agents like to call an “enclave”. I say it was a quiet side street, because in recent weeks one end of it has been plagued with a gang who loiter on the pavements twenty-fours a day, mostly doing absolutely nothing at all but occasionally indulging in outbursts of noisy anti-social behaviour.
No, this isn’t another “what’s wrong with the youth of Britain?” story. The gang in question are the paparazzi and their various hangers-on, runners and mates who are camped outside the residence of one Ms. Amy Winehouse, singer and celebrity.
Amy, being an international recording artiste of some renown, isn’t actually in Camden that often. If she is at her “home”, she is likely to be spotted no more than once a week, perhaps taking out the rubbish in the early hours of the morning, or jumping into a limo to get the hell out of it. But that hasn’t stopped there being a permanent group of between four and twenty paparazzi or their assistants camping there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on the (very) off-chance that she might show her bleary face. The numbers are made up by gawpers, wannabes, and people staggering back from bars and clubs who think it might be “a laugh” to take a look at “Amy’s gaff”.
There is a heirarchy in the paperazzi gang, starting from the top dogs who show up occasionally toting huge cameras on Paris-Dakar style motorbikes - top dogs don’t hang around for long because they’ve got other targets, but they have stringers and watchers who are left on site in a car (higher-class paperazzo), or on the pavement (lower-class paperazzo) with mobile phones in their sweaty palms, ready to get the message out. Mid-ranking paperazzi are too lazy or scared to do the motorbike thing so they rely on cars and taxis, the ones at the bottom of the pecking order have battered scooters and mopeds with their camera in a box on the back - they look like superannuated pizza delivery boys.
The watchers have for weeks occupied every possible parking space on the street (but don’t get ticketed because they stay in their cars so they are not actually parked . . ). A video or digital camera will be perched on the dashboard of the car, pointed at Amy’s door. Obviously with an average of less than one sighting a week most of these people are seriously, seriously bored and in a state of permanent anti-climax. Wafts of dope smoke come out of the car windows, heads are crouched over laptop computers, seeking some compensatory thrill on the internet. Runners are sent to get burgers and beers. When it rains most of them repair to the pub, with just one or two of the desperate or gullible ones left on watch.
When there actually is a “sighting”, pack mentality takes over completely and we see humans at their most feral. How do you attract a celeb’s attention? Try shouting “Oi Ami!” at the top of your voice. If that doesn’t work try shouting “Want to go to rehab, Amy? Rehab, Amy? Oi Ami, rehab?” a few times, jostle her, laugh at her. Within seconds the cries of “Amy, Amy, oi amy!” are filling the street, a minute after that the street will be swarming with more cars, more motorbikes and mopeds. Amy is besieged by a mob of jeering and laughing men (yes they’re all male) most of whom are trying to speak on a mobile and operate a camera at the same time.
You might have gathered that my sympathies are largely with Ms. Winehouse. Drug-addled twit she might or might not now be but at least she became a celebrity in the first place because she actually had talent. The paperazzi show us how the cult of celebrity brings out the worst in untalented envious people, who want only to drag the succcesful down, and see them fail.
In the long run paperazzi can probably only be discouraged when we stop buying trashy magazines (so that will never happen) or we adopt a privacy law like the Germans where the celeb’s permission is needed before the picture can be published.
In the short term, though, Camden is a “Dispersal Notice Area” which means the council and the police could invoke the power granted to them to “tell people in groups to disperse. Officers can also tell people who don’t live in the affected area to leave, and ban them from the area for up to 24 hours. It is an offence not to comply with these requests, punishable by up to three months in prison or a fine of up to £2,500, or both.”
Come on Camden, get these scum off your streets.
